


wwhat shall wwe do wwith the captured lowwblood

by coldhope



Series: HHCOD fills [18]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Pale Romance | Moirallegiance, firearms, hhcod request ficlet
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-29
Updated: 2013-01-29
Packaged: 2017-11-27 10:54:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,652
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/661177
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/coldhope/pseuds/coldhope
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>AHCOD request ficlet: Eridan damages himself by accident with one of his guns.</p>
            </blockquote>





	wwhat shall wwe do wwith the captured lowwblood

Anonymous asked eridan-hc-on-demand: 

Eridan's messing with one of his guns when something goes wrong and he literally shoots himself in the foot. I'm a big fan of KarkatEridan, but anything would work.

 

~

Say what you like about the DH series, Blastech still makes a hell of a weapon. Your old E17-d rifle is one of your very favorite guns, partly because it's such a basic goddamn design that there's very little that can actually go badly wrong with it. Sure, it eats up cores like nobody's business but it can put a neat little hole through a troll over a mile away, and the action is sweet and frictionless and satisfying as hell. 

You can also take it to bits and clean it yourself, which is something you absolutely cannot do with Ahab's Crosshairs--not that the legendary weapon would ever need any such maintenance, of course, but still there's something so damn satisfying about being able to strip and reassemble a gun and know every bit of it, inside and out. The older Blastech models tend to get carbon slag buildup inside the pulse chambers, which can fuck with bolt strength, and you finish each hunting or target-shooting trip with a thorough cleaning and inspection. The banana-ether smell of blaster solvent always soothes you with the memories it calls up, quiet times spent caring for your tools. The closest you ever really come to contentment.

In fact you're singing to yourself, softly, as you run a microfiber cloth soaked in solvent through the rifle's primary pulse chamber. You know a lot of sea-shanties, not all of them from your FLARPing days with Vriska. _What shall we do with the captured lowblood, ear-lye in the evening?_ Outside the darkseason storms are beginning to whine, wind picking up its song in the shrouds of your shiphive, and you are actually smiling, listening to the counterpoint of the wind to your (noticeably flat) singing. 

Something on the deck shifts with a hollow crash, and you stop with the shanty and the solvent. Probably just one of the empty barrels, but you'd better check before the storms really begin to whoop. Anything that's not tied down can cause more damage than it's worth, and your generator does not need to be knocked out of commission by a rogue bit of deck-debris. You snap the Seventeen's chamber closed and get up, and you are not actually sure exactly what happens next, only that the bright violet-white glare of a blaster bolt blinds you and there's the burnt-tin stink of ionized air and the lower, headier smell of burning wood, and you are suddenly sitting on the floor. 

It takes almost half a minute for the pain to hit. That's standard with the older Blastechs, there's something about the way the bolts are calibrated that fucks with nerve-endings, so you have a little time to stare at the hole directly through your foot, long enough to watch the blood well up and spill over like cold violet lava from a seamount, before you actually realize what you have done. 

The rifle is lying beside you half-smothered in your cape, and you can see where a stray thread caught between the chamber and the barrel when you snapped it shut-- _careless, Ampora, you know better than that, shit is shameful_ \--and how you must have tugged it over the edge of the table when you stood. How the edge and the firing stud met, and you didn't put the fucking safety on, you didn't _put the safety on_ , and now you are bleeding like a goddamn gaffed whalebeast and oh _there_ is the pain, yeah, there it is, there it is indeed. 

Whatever's loose on deck bangs again. It seems to break the spell, and you clutch at your damaged foot with both hands, taking the shoe off before it can swell enough to make this impossible. You are astonished at how much it hurts. You are less astonished to find that you can see all the way through your blood-soaked shoe, and wiggle a finger through the pair of holes, and find that the weird high-pitched giggling noise is, in fact, also you. 

~

It's amazing how much blood a troll actually contains. Perhaps more so when it's your own blood; the amount of it splattered and drying in puddles and smears on the decking seems ludicrous, absurd, unreal. You've cinched a belt around your ankle and tied up the hole with a spare scarf, which will never ever be the same, but it doesn't seem to have done much more than slow things down. It hurts to the point where you have thrown up, dragging yourself away from the puddle of sick with dull animal disgust to sit leaning against the wall. Probably you should do something like call for help, but the idea of finding your palmhusk and actually making the cognitive effort to contact anybody seems like a hell of a lot of work. Also, you may possibly just die of embarrassment any minute now. Might not be a worthwhile use of functional synapses.

~

Someone is shaking you. You wish they wouldn't: it hurts. You're dizzy and you feel sick and your entire left foot all the way up to the knee is apparently on fire, and being shaken doesn't make any of these facts less noticeable. Whoever it is has warm, hard little hands, rough with calluses, and they use one of these to slap you hard enough so you see stars. 

"...hey," you say.

"...the fuck, Eridan," whoever it is is snarling. He sounds like he's coming from a long way away, as if his voice is carried on a signal that's drifting in and out through waves of static. "...did you even _do_ , you complete imbecile...believe you...eyond the fucking pale..."

You are...lifted? Carried? Everything wheels and swings; you can't really see. "Who...?" you ask your companion, and are rewarded with a noise like an irritated teakettle. You know that noise. 

"...Kar?"

"Yes, fuckwit, who the hell d'you think, Troll Nora Ephron? Shut up and try not to die of sheer world-class idiocy while I sort your flaily purple ass out." He's doing something to your foot that hurts even more than it's hurting already, and you try to tell him not to, but you go away for a little while instead. 

When you come back, you can see a little better. You're in your respiteblock, lying on the couch, looking up at the familiar ceiling and the familiar purple-shaded light hanging from it. When you try to move, the pain wakes up again and roars up your leg, and you hiss despite yourself. Your foot is neatly bandaged and resting on a cushion on the couch-arm.

Karkat stops reading his palmhusk and looks up. He's sitting at your desk. "Back with us?"

"Kar?"

"Yeah, we did that part already, I'm me, you're you, you're also the dumbest excuse for a brinesucker I ever encountered in my short and miserable stretch of existence." His voice has no rancor in it at all, and when he comes over to look down at you his weird eyes are warm. "Eridan, why the fuck didn't you call for help? I got here late for the fishing trip and found you passed out in your workroom with most of your blood on the outside."

Oh. Right. You'd been going to take him fishing. That had been a thing you'd arranged to do. 

"I don't even want to know how you managed to shoot yourself in the fucking foot," Karkat continues, "but when you are feeling a little less shitty I am going to scream at you until I lose my voice, okay? You're supposed to be _careful_ with your goddamn weaponry. You keep telling me how careful you are. At length."

"'m careful," you say.

"Bullshit you are. I put that thing in the closet out of the way and you're not going near it until I say you can."

That makes you try and sit up, and discover that you can't currently do much of anything without your foot hurting badly enough to make you seriously consider amputation. He mutters something and pulls out a handkerchief to wipe the sweat from your face. "You're gonna be okay. Have to take it easy for a while, you lost a lot of blood, but I don't think it'll get infected. Very clean shot."

"Did I..." you have another go, "did I break anything?"

"Nope, right between the bones. You're the first troll I ever met with a pierced foot, that's got to be a fashion revolution." He strokes your hair, and his hand is wonderfully warm. 

"Thanks," you manage, and reach up to try and capture his hand with yours: it takes you two tries. He lets you lace your fingers with his. "Thanks."

"Don't thank me, I'm just preserving my interests," he says, but he leans down to brush your forehead with rough lips. "Idiot. You're stuck with me for a couple nights anyway, I'm not leaving you alone to damage yourself further until you can reliably fucking walk."

You are appalled to find yourself close to tears, and maybe he can tell, because he just nudges you and tells you to move over, and wriggles onto the couch so you can rest your head in his lap. Warm fingers go on combing through your hair; warm touches on your horns take a lot of the pain away. He's so much hotter than you are, and it's always been soothing, like being wrapped in a warm shawl against the cold. 

"Pale for you." It's barely even a whisper, you're already drifting away again. He laughs, and you can feel it as well as hear the sound. 

"Pale as fishbones, asshole. Go to sleep. Dream overdecorated purple dreams, I'm here, I got you."

You smile.

**Author's Note:**

> yes, Blastech is the property of the Star Wars Extended Universe. I like the idea of Eridan being a traditionalist. He probably has an EE-3 carbine hanging around somewhere, in better nick than Boba Fett's.


End file.
